support recovery, ensuring people feel heard and respected and are confident that their concerns have been taken seriously and that their views and preferences have been appropriately considered

improve services, ensuring compliance with the requirements of the Act and the mental health principles and identifying opportunities to improve services

improve individual experiences, providing a person centred process that works to reduce fears and build the confidence and relationships needed for a person to raise complaints directly with the service

aim to prevent a recurrence of issues, for the individual concerned or for others.

The Act gives us flexibility to work with the person on the most appropriate approach to resolve their complaint.

Wherever possible, we promote the early resolution of complaints between the person and the service. We support the person and the service to work together to gain a mutual understanding of the issues and reach agreement on ways in which these can be addressed and resolved.

We work with services to develop ways to effectively respond to complaints, and to take into account the ‘Four As’ of complaint resolution: acknowledgement, answers, action and apology.

We aim to ensure services implement any agreed actions to address individual concerns or improve the services they provide, and record these as outcomes of complaints.

We also use our powers under the Act to obtain responses from services on risk and safeguarding issues, to investigate matters and provide recommendations to services for addressing quality and safety issues identified in complaints.